Building an underground system for Dublin

breadmonkey

I'm curious about a few things relating to a potential underground system here. Places like Munich, Barcelona, Toronto....etc really make Ireland look like a total backwater.

1) Is it actually possible to construct an underground system here? I thought I heard somewhere before that it wasn't possible because we had no bed rock*.

2) How long does it typically take to construct an extensive system? (Not some piddly thing linking Sandyford to Stephen's Green.)

3) What do these things typically cost?

4) Can Ireland afford it?

5) Are there currently any plans to build one at some point?

6) I'm 21, am I likely to see this happen in my lifetime? Seriously.

SeanW

There are 2 underground lines scheduled for construction under the proposal Transport 21.

The first is the Dublin Metro North, a light (think Luas on steroids) Metro running from St. Stephens Green to Swords.

There is also a DART expansion called the Interconnector. This tunnel will link the line out of Heuston with the Northern DART Line, the proposal is that DART trains will run from Hazelhatch, go undergound near Inchicore, stop at Heuston, High St/Digitial Hub, St. Stephens Green, Pearse, Spencer Dock come overground at Church Road Junction and continue making local stops from Clontarf to Balbriggan/Howth.

They are to be done sequentially, Metro North to be done by 2012 and the Interconnector by 2015.

Captain Trips

An underground would be good, but people are lazy anyway, and even with good transport links on the Dart, Luas and suburban rail, people will move to bloody Lucan in droves and then wonder why it sucks.

I don't think there is a need for an underground like London. I would think developing the trams further and integrating the ticketing system between Bus, Rail and trams is the best step.

It would probably take decades, seeing as there is such lethargy in transport developments. I think the Luas is great though, but at this stage I would have expected that more would have been constructed building up several linked arms from the centre, and linking Green and Red under the centre, and then on to the Airport or wherever it's going.

Also, running the services late at the weekends would be great. A big problem is where people are choosing to live, as living in Lucan might be close to Dublin, but would you be better in say Greystones and getting the Dart?

Any advice on where you should live say, in London, etc., people will always talk about being near a tube stop that goes to the nearest tube where you work, but I rarely hear people (with all the talk of property) in Dublin discuss buyng a place because it is x stops from whatever Dart station and so on.

Decades I would say, and it would be cheaper to keep with the trams. I take it you mean say 6 arms or something, 3 north and 3 south, maybe 1 more west. Make the west dubliners suffer more! Haha! Luas cost 700 million or something, for two lines, so subway would be double??

It could be called Dubway.

bk

breadmonkey wrote:

1) Is it actually possible to construct an underground system here? I thought I heard somewhere before that it wasn't possible because we had no bed rock*.

The opposite, Dublin actually has a very hard bed rock mostly limestone that is hard and expensive to drill through.

More info here:
http://www.gsi.ie/news/GSI_News/Issue_No_04/Web/Subsurface_geol.htm

breadmonkey wrote:

2) How long does it typically take to construct an extensive system? (Not some piddly thing linking Sandyford to Stephen's Green.)

Well the London Underground first opened in 1863 and continues to be developed today.

breadmonkey wrote:

3) What do these things typically cost?

Something like London would cost well over €100 Billion.

breadmonkey wrote:

4) Can Ireland afford it?

No, not the size of London.

breadmonkey wrote:

5) Are there currently any plans to build one at some point?

There are currently plans to build two underground lines, Metro North and the Dart Interconnector under the T21 plan. These are actually very significant projects and equivalent to underground projects being built in other cities you mention above.

breadmonkey wrote:

6) I'm 21, am I likely to see this happen in my lifetime? Seriously.

Well the two above will be built in the next 10 years. And don't forget that there are other significant rail projects like the Maynooth Dart line, Metro West, Luas to Lucan, Luas to Liffey Junction, etc.

All of these will actually leave us with a very good rail infrastructure when completed and I'm sure it will get continued development in the future.

The thing is we don't really need a system as good as London Underground, we simply don't have the population for it. You only need to go underground, when you have no other choice, because of lack of space, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having above ground lines like the Luas and the Dart, if you have space for them.

For instance Prague has an absolutely stunning public transport system. Yet they have only three underground lines, all equivalent to our Metro system. However they do have about 100 tram lines, which together make for a fantastic system.

Seth Brundle

bk wrote:

Something like London would cost well over €100 Billion.

Is that before or after the huge cost overruns?

sdanseo

SeanW wrote:

This tunnel will link the line out of Heuston with the Northern DART Line

When will these planners realiuse that there's already a line there!! What a useless waste of money.

DublinWriter

bk wrote:

For instance Prague has an absolutely stunning public transport system. Yet they have only three underground lines

As does Brussels and it only has two. But in places you have electric trams going both under and over-ground on the same line and an very efficent bus service links the less-dense outer areas of the city not covered by the underground.

It's all to do with joined-up transport planning. The Belgians have an integrated ticketing system and there's not many traffic lights in Brussels (priorite-a-gauche system).

Even better still in the NewYork metro. They really planned years in advance by having their main lines have 4 tracks instead of two in order to provide express non-stop trains. Here in Dublin our Northern Dart line is also shared by Intercity train traffic, which is completely nuts.

Heinrich

If the port tunnel is anything to go by then the proposed underground and Ballymun on stilts will be some debacle!

In any problem simplicity is the best solution. Most of the major projects undertaken here have been overrun in time frames and finance. The solutions offered are not real.

Let's look at the health care, public transport, traffic congestion on the motorways, Airport, Law and Order and the list goes on. Can we really admit that these areas are in the slightest way successful? Whilst our ministers trot out waffle and statistics people are dying due to a severe failure in the running of the health service.

A burst watermain causes a gridlock of up to 7 hours! New busses are bought and to speed up the delivery they are ordered as "replacements" for the existing fleet. Then we find that the busses have no drivers because none are available.

The public transport in Geneva is second to none. Why do the junket ministers and their staff not look there for guidance? Pollution free electric trolley busses in dedicated bus lanes as well as three tram lines soon to become four serve the city and outskirts admirably. Admittedly the city is smaller than dublin but in terms of population that would not be the case.

The new trolleys serving certain routes have three articulations and the capacity should be in the region of 250 persons. If you allow 1.5 passengers per private motor car then that would take approximately 160 vehicules off the road every 10 minutes at peak hours for those particular routes.

Ticketing is done with machines placed at each bus stop. 2 euros gets you an hour's ride on any bus, tram and even a ferry across the river. There are random inspections and an defaulters pay dearly. There are usually three inspectors per inspection.

There are no toll on the Swiss motorways and money is collected by way of an annual permit (vignette) which costs around 30 euros! Everybody using the motorway must pay this tax. It certainly sppeds up the system.

The federal railways stick very close to timetables and correspondence at major intersecting stations is extremely precise. Link ups with the smaller mountain railways runs like clockwork.

Worth a look at. The medical system is another story, even more interesting.

Still, we will be trotting off to vote for the authors of our ongoing crises and debacles because the *cough* alternative are not much better. Whether they are or not we cannot really say as they were never actually doing the job. We should give the others a shot at it, they could hardly make a worse mess of things.

Sarsfield

sdonn_1 wrote:

When will these planners realiuse that there's already a line there!! What a useless waste of money.

While I agree it would be good to see the Park Tunnel in use, it is completely incorrect to imagine it as an alternative to the Interconnector.

Calina

I don't have solutions per se...but with the best will in the world, a lot of what passes for transport planning in this country - city, sorry - passes for short termism and a lot of what passes for "should be done" is superficial at best.

When Dublin decided to build the Luas, they should have actually gone to the trouble of building an integreated metro and tram system. They went for the Luas because it was a) cheaper and b) faster. IIRC the nice people at the Green Party objected to any part of the Luas as it became being built under ground because by making it share the road with traffic it would make driving in the city harder and force more people on to public transport. I was living in Brussels at the time and I was absolutely appalled. It has coloured my opinion of the GP seriously.

There are something like a million and a half and more people living in what could be called the Greater Dublin Area, which stretches out to north County Dublin, vast swathes of Wicklow and Kildare. Relative to a similar sized city in terms of population such as Brussels or maybe Munich (I think) however, the city covers a massive amount of space because of the way it is laid out. This makes transport planning hard, and because of the way politics works in this country, there is often a lack of joined up thinking. The metro out to Swords from the city centre is a very, very good idea, hampered only by the fact that the town of Swords covers a vast area, and more of Swords' residential area will be a mile from various metro stations than will be nearer. This is not, per se, the metro's fault, it's linked to how Swords is laid out, in terms of where Applewood is, where Holywell is, where Boroimhe is and where the Lioscians/Sandford Woods and Bunbury Gate estates are. In simple terms, the population density makes it hard.

Other things which have happened is that major retail and industrial parks have been plugged along the peripheral road when we don't really have an integrated peripheral transport network. I used to live in Dublin 9 and work in Castleknock. At the time, to travel to work by bus took on average, 90 minutes, and often more. If the bus to Drumcondra turned up on time and didn't get screwed by the traffic system, I occasionally managed to get an Arrow instead and the journey took a lot less. More often than not, it was easier me to get a bus to Dublin Airport and be picked up by a colleague coming from Balbriggan.

The layout of Dublin streets doesn't really help either and that's basically historical. You can't do anything about the fact that in many parts of the city, roadwidth effectually halves. This causes immense problems in trying to layout buslanes - with the result we have buslanes where they are not so necessary, but there's nowhere to put them where they are desperately required. Added to that, at certain critical times of the day, we have not enough road capacity for buses which are still full. Twelve years ago it used to take me less time to walk from Phibsborough to work in near Leeson Street in the morning than it took the bus purely because of the O'Connell Street bottleneck. Despite the advent of buslanes and the removal of private transport from the left turn onto North Frederick Street it was my experience before Christmas that it could take up to 30 minutes to travel 300m in a bus - along a street that only had buses lined up on, trying to get down O'Connell Street. My experience is that despite a load of measures to make things better, things are worse because the load on them continues to increase.

The problem - as I see it - is that a lot of what passes for debate on transport planning in Dublin is confrontational and competitive. With the result that on this forum alone, you have a lot of whinging about the numbers of people using Dublin Bus falling therefore Dublin Bus is uselss (viz that thread on the subject of trouble on the buses). Unfortunately, I don't ultimately see that as a productive way of doing business. Not only that - much debate on the subject of public transport in this country centres on spending as little money as possible. This is why the heavy rail connection between the Airport and is it Portmarnock Dart station is favoured by some. I see that as only a short term solution to be honest. The big issue is that Dublin is growing, and it is growing in a seriously unplanned manner and without taking a long term look at both transport planning and residential planning - believe me there are a load of apartment blocks that will be demolished before the end of their 99 year leases because they were built with short term profit in mind - we are going to fail.

Again, I'm not an expert, and what I think should be done will differ from the ideas of a lot of other people. We have to lose this notion that Dublin Bus - or the city bus service in whatever form - has to compete with other transport options. The reality is the bus system as it exists is 1) heavily overloaded in certain parts of the city and 2) has little room for maneouvre in terms of available road capacity even if we fling a load of buses at it. In short, we should be looking to reduce our dependency on the bus service. Don't get me wrong - I think that DB, in the face of a total amount of government apathy, political footballing and generalised lack of support from the people they serve plus a massive amount of misinformation do a fairly decent job. But the bus system should not be forming the backbone of public transport in a city the size of Dublin. It should be complementing a far more integrated system.

For that to work though will require a mindset change on the part of a lot of people.

Loosely speaking, what I think would be useful is Metro north, and a peripheral system that loosely mirrors the route of the M50. Metro North and the peripheral route could potentially meet at the Airport, or Swords - I'd say that the Airport would be more useful and route to Portmarnock to meet the Dart there. I'm not so au fait with the south side of the city, but I see no reason why it couldn't get as far as Dunlaoighaire. But that's going to cost a lot of money in the short term and in this country that is very much a dirty word. After that, we will need to convert some buses to feeder buses to the metro/rail stations like a) we had in early days and b) which doesn't appear to be a sensible way of doing things any more.

I'm not convinced that we really need the interconnector to be honest, having just looked at the T21 site. I just can't see a justification for it with the existence of Metro North. On the other hand, what might be more useful is to link more of the northern DART lines with parts of the Metro North and that is what buses should be used for. This, however, will require a very decent amount of humility on the part of the people who run Dublin Bus, Irish Rail, the RPA, Connex and whoever else runs bus services around Dublin - I can think of a couple of private companies in the loop - in that the remit of public transport is not to line pockets first and foremost, it is the serve the public. In other words, none of this is going to work unless it is integrated. Other cities can and do manage this. I'm sick of hearing excuses as to why it isn't done here. CIE has managed a modicum of this between the DART and buses in the past, and they historically managed it between national rail servies and links into the city centre. For that reason, I know it is possible in this country and from that I can only assume that the only reason it doesn't happen is that egos are too big.

Our remit should - in the medium term - be to get people out of their cars and out of the bus system. That requires a certain amount of vision and a hell of a lot of money. My impression in this country is that people in power don't have the vision over a long enough term, and won't put the money in place. I'm unwilling to take London as an example because I was there when they were building the Jubilee Line extension and it ran years late in the end. If you want to get a public transport project done in this country, I think we need to call in the French who managed to extend the Paris Metro and RER systems in the past ten years with relatively little difficulty, they have managed to get trams into Bordeaux without too much grief and the population of Bordeaux is analagous to Cork and the layout of the city wasn't exactly along a grid either. The Germans have a pretty good record too, and I think there's some very good systems in Spain and Italy as well. All these countries have managed to make city transport in their big cities work. We, because we tend, more often than not, to be politically driven rather than necessity driven, are making a total and utter mess of even assessing what the needs.

If you put the ring line in place and connect it properly to the other lines that we sort of have or are planning, it should make life in the outer suburbs a bit easier in terms of public transport and two hour bus commutes from Blanchardstown and Lucan might be a thing of the past. Meanwhile, when we are next building property in the greater Dublin area, instead of building a load of one bed apartments in gated residential developments with a few duplexes and no parking or access to public transport, we might design blocks around streets and parks and squares instead of housing estates. We will get more people in and extending public transport might be a bit easier with a greater return on lesser investment.

The other thing which needs to be done in this city is move the bus stops further apart. It is absolutely ridiculous in some places such as on the distributor road through my estate that they are less than 200m apart. Yes people will have to walk a bit further but not that much further. In every city I have lived in in Germany, France and Belgium, bus timetables had the time of the stop on them, not the time of the terminus. As in, every stop on the bus stop was on average a 5 to ten minute walk apart (ten in Brussels from what I remember) and every stop had its name and place on the bus timetable. And they managed, despite all to run on time. When all this is done - if there is ever a miracle and I become transport dictator for life - a fall in the number of people using the buses should not be seen as a failure of the bus system, but as a measure of how successful we might be in getting people into other forms of transport. Effectively, building new transport options will by definition cause the numbers using the bus to fall. What matters is that we manage to reduce the traffic gridlock on the streets of Dublin and once that is done, to keep it that way, I would favour the introduction of additional congestion charging (the cost of parking in Dublin relative to other cities in the country and, indeed, other cities in Europe) is a congestion charge all on its own, feeding private companies).

All that to say I think Dublin needs an underground system, but subsequent housing planning will have to be borne in mind with it, and that it can't be seen independent of other transport requirements...basically.

breadmonkey

Nice post Calina.

On the subject of integration: Who's bright idea was it to terminate the Green Luas line at Sandyford? It's a total dead end in terms of public transport. There are a small few buses like the 46b that go there once every month or so but apart from that - NOTHING! Even if they got it as far as the N11, things would be easier.

OTK

breadmonkey wrote:

3) What do these things typically cost?

The EU gave an approx figure of 150m/km in 2004 (price excludes trains). Current projects for Dublin seem to be priced at about 200m/km (the airport metro is really metro lite, with half the capacity of a tube line in London). The luas was built for 31m/km including rolling stock, stations, train yards and land. Doesn't seem so dear by comparison but lower capacity and takes up surface space.

4) Can Ireland afford it?

Infrastructure is an investment decision not just a cost. Each project is meant to be judged according to the returns to the economy. Justification is mostly based on projected passenger numbers which are linked to the number of people in walkable distance of each station and the pattern of journeys carried out by those people. Road congestion makes rail projects more viable.

The dept. of transport will spend around 2.7 billion this year. Two thirds of this will go on roads.

There is an argument that all rail travel requires public subsidy while car drivers pay more tax than they cost the state for road building, therefore don't build any rail and just make more roads. The flaw with this argument is that once road capacity is maxed out, it's very difficult to allow more people to get around without paving half the city and making it 100km wide. Each car journey costs the economy in more subtle ways than direct cash (carbon emissions, noise, loss of visual amenity, increase in lethal and fatal accident risk).

Expect all road and rail projects to halt if the economy starts to recede.

bk

OTK wrote:

The EU gave an approx figure of 150m/km in 2004 (price excludes trains). Current projects for Dublin seem to be priced at about 200m/km (the airport metro is really metro lite, with half the capacity of a tube line in London). The luas was built for 31m/km including rolling stock, stations, train yards and land. Doesn't seem so dear by comparison but lower capacity and takes up surface space.

London Underground consists of 408 km of lines, therefore it would cost €81,600 Million excluding rolling stock to build today, so that would easily put it over my €100 Billion estimate.

spacetweek

Calina wrote:

I don't have solutions per se...but with the best will in the world, a lot of what passes for transport planning in this country - city, sorry - passes for short termism and a lot of what passes for "should be done" is superficial at best.
...
All that to say I think Dublin needs an underground system, but subsequent housing planning will have to be borne in mind with it, and that it can't be seen independent of other transport requirements...basically.

Calina, a lot of good points there, I agree with most of it.

Bit confused about your idea for a rail route roughly along the M50 - they are building that, it's called Metro West.

I don't agree with what you're saying about not building the Interconnector, I think it's totally essential if we are to rationalise the rail lines and allow for an increase in their capacity.

Totally with you on the subject of buses - I see buses becoming a far less important mode of transport in the future as both motorists and bus users shift to rail. However, due to the continuing growth in the population of the city, I don't see the actual number of bus passengers falling - rather, its modal share is all that will fall.

Calina

I must confess that somehow - I don't know why - MetroWest had passed me by. Mea culpa on that - I only found out about it today.

As for the interconnector - based on what's on it on the T21 website I remain to be convinced. However, I don't run transport here so I am open to being proven wrong.

Thanks anyway.

mackerski

Calina wrote:

As for the interconnector - based on what's on it on the T21 website I remain to be convinced. However, I don't run transport here so I am open to being proven wrong.

Well, the interconnector achieves with a single railway (albeit one through a very expensive tunnel) the elimination of the conflicts that prevent a useful train service on the Maynooth line along with providing commuters on that line and the Kildare one a more useful set of true city centre destination stations. Perhaps there are alternative ways of doing this, but I've seen none suggested.

And to build new lines without solving the problems on the ones we already have is just plain wasteful.

Lennoxschips

The opposite, Dublin actually has a very hard bed rock mostly limestone that is hard and expensive to drill through

Limestone is mostly Calcium Carbonate, which is a softish mineral (softer than a human nail), I doubt it could be that expensive to drill through. Ideally you don't want to be drilling through muck, which has waterproofing problems while drilling, or really hard stuff like quartz-rich sandstone.

limestone strata used for copenhagen metro